Free vibration analysis of doubly curved shallow shells using the Superposition-Galerkin method

This paper demonstrates the applicability of the Superposition Method for free vibration analysis of doubly curved thin shallow shells of rectangular planform with any possible combination of simply supported and clamped edges. The same building block yields the natural frequencies for 55 combinations of edge conditions. The natural frequency parameters of the shells were obtained using the Superposition-Galerkin Method (SGM) for seven sets of boundary conditions, several different curvature ratios and two aspect ratios. The SGM uses approximate steady state solutions as building blocks but the method proves to be accurate and efficient. It has also been shown that even with approximate building blocks, the monotonic nature of convergence of the natural frequencies with respect to the number of driving coefficients holds, as long as the number of admissible functions in the steady state solution is kept constant. The results for natural frequencies of the seven boundary conditions may be considered as benchmarks. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.